Lifeboat Foundation

At Collision, start-ups showcased technologies to hire and motivate employees and build better teams. From recruiting to retention, apps are adding automation to the HR function.

Boston Dynamics’ robots look more natural and more amazing with each video, and today the company posted two more clips to its YouTube channel showing the latest progress of its Atlas and SpotMini robots.

When you take a picture of a cat and Google’s algorithms place it in a folder called “pets,” with no direction from you, you’re seeing the benefit of image recognition AI. The exact same technology is used by doctors to diagnose diseases on a scale never before possible by humans.

Diabetic retinopathy, caused by type two diabetes, is the fastest-growing cause of preventable blindness. Each of the more than 415 million people living with the disease risks losing their eyesight unless they have regular access to doctors.

In countries like India there are simply too many patients for doctors to treat. There are 4,000 diabetic patients for every ophthalmologist in India, where the US has one for every 1,500 patients.

Continue reading “Seeing is believing: How AI could prevent blindness for 415 million people (right now)” »

Drones that monitor crops, control mosquito populations and deliver defibrillators are to be tested in US airspace.

Ten commercial drone projects have been selected to try out new ways for unmanned aircraft to be integrated into the skies.

They include Zipline, which currently offers a blood-delivery service in Rwanda, and Apple.

Continue reading “US commercial drones given green light” »

Researchers can now send secret audio instructions undetectable to the human ear to Apple’s Siri, Amazon’s Alexa and Google’s Assistant.

Credit Lynn Scurfield

A computer programme modelled on the human brain learnt to navigate a virtual maze and take shortcuts, outperforming a flesh-and-blood expert, its developers said Wednesday.

While artificial intelligence (AI) programmes have recently made great strides in imitating human brain processing—everything from recognising objects to playing complicated board games—spatial navigation has remained a challenge.

Continue reading “Self-navigating AI learns to take shortcuts: study” »

Many people in tech point out that artificial narrow intelligence, or A.N.I., has grown ever safer and more reliable—certainly safer and more reliable than we are. (Self-driving cars and trucks might save hundreds of thousands of lives every year.) For them, the question is whether the risks of creating an omnicompetent Jeeves would exceed the combined risks of the myriad nightmares—pandemics, asteroid strikes, global nuclear war, etc.—that an A.G.I. could sweep aside for us.

Thinking about artificial intelligence can help clarify what makes us human—for better and for worse.

With Google’s I/O developer conference kicking off later today, Google is setting the scene for what it expects to be one of the big themes of the event: artificial intelligence. Today, the company rebranded the whole of its Google Research division as Google AI, with the old Google Research site now directing to a newly expanded Google AI site.

Google has over the years worked on a wide variety of other computing pursuits beyond AI, and all of that content will continue to exist within that new site, the company said. But the move signals how Google has increasingly focused a lot of its R&D on breaking new ground across the many facets of AI specifically, from technologies like computer vision, natural language processing, and neural networks, through to applications across virtually any and every business that Google currently and potentially touches, such as video, search and mobile apps, but also healthcare, automotive applications and other verticals.

That’s not just Google reflecting how the wider world of tech is evolving; it’s also a measure of how much Google has influenced it.

Continue reading “Google goes all-in on artificial intelligence, renames research division Google AI” »

Today we take an amusing look at how science fiction is often portrayed in a jarring way especially when dealing with the topic of life extension.

Those of us who fancy science fiction stories are used to all sorts of technological miracles taking place in them; some are plausible and might become reality at some point in the future, while others are mere fantasies, artistic liberties that are taken to tell a better story and will likely never translate into real-life technologies—or, if they will, they will do so at the cost of rethinking fundamental principles that we’ve thus far considered to be fully established.

In science fiction, we’ve seen faster-than-light travel, teleportation, portals, energy weapons, strong AI, telepathic powers, and radiation-induced superpowers of all kinds; unfortunately, the only “superpower” known to be actually induced by radiation thus far is cancer. Entire imaginary worlds have revolved around the existence of one or more of these marvels, and series and shows have assumed that they’re possible and imagined what our society would be like with them, but one particular possibility has been neglected or relegated to one or two episodes and then forgotten, as if it was of no importance whatsoever: the defeat of aging.

Continue reading “Life Extension Technology in Science Fiction” »